


Different Strokes

by carryonstarkid



Series: TAG DeviantAU [3]
Category: Thunderbirds, thunderbirds are go
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 17:10:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12215202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carryonstarkid/pseuds/carryonstarkid
Summary: The relationships Gordon had on his trail to the Olympics, and the ones he didn't.





	Different Strokes

He snaps the cap against the back of Gordon’s neck.  “Gah!  _Asshole_.”

“Not my fault that you still trust me to put your cap on,” he says.  “Are you jumping in first today, or am I?”

Gordon scoffs.  “Yeah.  You go first.  I always look forward to getting kicked in the face with every other stroke.”

“We have the same fifty time and you know it.”

“Sure, but who’s got the better two-hundred?”

With this, both Gordon and his shit-eating grin are pushed directly off the edge of the pool and land with a  _smack_  against the surface of the water.  It leaves a tingle on his skin, chlorine stinging in his nose, and he laughs, comes up for air.

“You’re a real fuckin’ piece of work, Tracy.”

Gordon glides into the wall, looks up at his fellow flier, and shrugs.  “Not my fault your endurance is shit, Flash.”

Flash opens his mouth to respond, but there’s a sharp, pointed whistle from the other side of the deck and both boys take off before Coach can add any more sprints to their pre-set.  Flash leaps over Gordon—his starts, at least, have always been enviable—and fifteen seconds later, Gordon himself pushes off the wall into streamline.

The water always feels cold at first, and he’s learned over the years that roughly half of all the effort put into this sport goes into maintaining the illusion that it is at all enjoyable.  Honestly.  When people say they love to swim, what they really mean is that they’ve talked themselves out of hating it—because it’s so easy to hate it.  Practices before dawn, the constant reek of chlorine.  Dryland drills, and strict diets, and water up to the back of his nose.  The way it leaves behind a heavy, waterlogged ache, not just in his arms or his legs, but  _everywhere_ , and all the time.  The way he dreads that first jump in, no matter how many times he’s done it.  Swimming is easy to hate.  Real swimmers—the ones who stick with it—have to find the parts that they love.

Flash is at the end of the lane, and Gordon’s reminded that  _technically_ Flash has the better fifty time, even if he is usually pretty gracious about those three-hundredths of a second.  By any normal standard, Flash should be pushing off of the wall first—always.  Period.  Except that, by now, both of them know better than to hold Flash to any sort of normal standards.  

In nearly everything, they’re evenly matched.  The perfect partners.  Challenging one another, every day, every hour, every hundredth of a second—racing towards a constant tie.  They’ve had the same coaches, the same techniques.  Their butterfly: identical.  It’s been said more than once that, while in the water, hidden behind caps and goggles, the two boys are nearly indistinguishable, with only one key difference to set them apart.

Flash is going to die.  Flash always dies.

He’s got the speed, but he’s just got no way of pacing himself.  He swims like he’s angry, swims the same way a boxer hits the bag.  Swims like he somehow has everything and nothing to lose at the same time.  Sooner rather than later, his whole stroke starts to collapse, technique abandoned, and Gordon’s able to lap him two times over.  That’s how he earned his name—because everything he does is big, and bright, and then he burns out in an instant, leaving behind only smoke.

And there’s a count going on in the back of Gordon’s mind, groggy and half-aware, in that way that feels reserved for warmups, and cool downs, and all those times when swimming feels more like a transition than a reality—50, 100, 150.  It almost feels like a cosmic certainty that by the time Gordon reaches 200 meters, he will have passed Flash, just like it’s a cosmic certainty that Flash will knock Gordon’s sprint out of the water.  That’s just how it works.  That’s how it has worked for years.  It’s predictable, it’s consistency, as intuitive as breathing every other stroke.

If there’s anything Gordon really, truly loves about swimming, it’s swimming with Flash.  It’s easy—it’s almost  _comfortable_ , the way they work together.  Teammates, in the strongest sense of the word.

Flash must feel it too, because he’s smiling when he takes his final stroke into the wall.  He wipes the water from the curve of his nose, pulls his goggles from his head, even though Coach always tells him not to.  There’s great red rings around his eyes and he blinks away the drops along his lashes.  “One of these days, Tracy,” he huffs.  “One of these days, I’m going to be first.”

Flash’s breath catches at the surface of the water, and there’s a steady stream of drips falling from the single curl that sticks out from beneath his cap.  Gordon feels his own breaths tumble.  “One of these days, you won’t spend it all on the first lap—”

But before he can finish, there’s another whistle, this one long, and loud, and angry, and both boys turn towards the source.  It’s the kind of whistle that belongs to a lifeguard, possibly even a fire marshal, and Gordon is almost surprised to see his coach on the other end of it.  

Then he sees Seth, and everything starts to make more sense.

There’s no good way to show up late for practice, but it’s generally agreed upon that the  _best_ way to show up late for practice is to do so in a pair of Jammers, with your cap already on and your goggles already tightened.  This is mostly done in an attempt to limit the amount of time spent on the deck, so that when Coach yells at you—and he _will_ yell at you—you can use the fact that you’re fully submerged in 600 thousand gallons of water as an excuse to pretend you don’t hear him.

Seth should know that.  Seth is the one who taught him that.

Coach is yelling, screaming something about States, and qualifying times, and thank you—oh _thank you_ , team captain—for finally joining us, but Gordon isn’t listening.  Gordon just watches in abject horror as Seth saunters in the door, duffel swung over his shoulder, fully clothed from top to bottom.  

Seth reminds Gordon of Scott, if Scott were less of an asshole and if he had, at any point in his life, held anything lower than an A- in basic algebra.  There’s just something about the way they both walk—the tallest guys in the room, and totally aware of that fact.  Scott was team captain, once upon a time.  Led the track team to Nationals.  There’s a certain sense of springtime Americana that lingers in every word they say, in every way they move.

And when he talks to Gordon—talks to  _any_  of the freshmen—it’s always in that same tone Scott uses.  Like he’s been there, he’s done that.  The difference is that when it comes from Scott, he sounds bored.  When it comes from Seth, he sounds like he wants you to do better.  Like you’ve got no excuse to make the same mistakes he did.

Gordon’s always heard it said that people can pick their family.  When it comes down to older brothers, Gordon would probably pick Seth over Scott.

Except for right now.  In this moment, he might be more inclined to pick Scott.

Because Scott would never walk into practice late, and he definitely wouldn’t do it with pants on.  And when asked why he was seventeen minutes late, Scott would never reply with a flippant, “Because.”

Flash looks at Gordon.  Gordon looks at Flash.  Silently, the two debate whether or not they could actually hold their breath and hide underwater for the remaining hour and forty-three minutes of practice.  Eventually, it’s decided that this seems unlikely, but even so, they’ve sunken down into the water, all the way up to their noses, like a pair of crabs crawling up into their shells in the hopes that they might go unseen.

This, of course, doesn’t work, because Coach blows his whistle for a third time and, before any protest can follow, every last member of their team is standing on the deck, arms crossed over their shoulders, awaiting whatever catastrophe is sure to follow.

It’s no secret that Coach is a firm advocate of team repentance.  If one of your teammates has failed, you have also failed, for each member of the team is responsible for the others.  Keep each other out of trouble, keep each other committed, care about one another.  That has been the cornerstone of Gordon’s relationship with every last one of the boys around him.

So it comes as no surprise when Coach announces that they will all be held responsible.  It comes as no surprise when he tells them that they’ll be doing sprint sets until Seth wants to share where he’s been.  Anyone who feels this is unfair is invited to leave, so long as they don’t expect to return tomorrow.

The sheer layer of hatred in the room feels so thick that Gordon fears Seth may actually drown in it.

Except that when he looks at Seth, there doesn’t seem to be any apology.  Not an ounce spared for his fellow teammates.  He just stands, like Scott might, tall and proud, and absolutely sure that he’s right.

And while the rest of the team all lines up behind their blocks, cursing and kicking and just generally hating the world, distracted by all they despise about their favorite sport, Gordon watches his captain make his way across the deck, just behind lane four, and drop his duffel from his shoulder.  It lands with a substantial  _thunk_  against a pile of mats that sit up against the wall, and Seth doesn’t seem to notice when a little orange bottle rolls off the edge and down towards a floor drain.

Gordon watches the bottle as it rolls, rolls, rolls closer to him and teeters over the drain gate.  Seth takes his place behind lane one, the bottle still unnoticed.

He picks it up.  “I didn’t know Seth needed—”

“He doesn’t.”  Only then does Gordon realize that Flash was watching, too.  Only then, with that look on Flash’s face, does he realize that maybe they shouldn’t have been.

Still, Gordon holds up the bottle.  “Then why would—?”

“C’mon, Tracy,” he says, pulling Gordon’s hand down.  His voice is low, conspiratorial.  “You know what those are.”

And he does, once he lets himself think about it.  Once he thinks about Seth’s seed times, how they just keep getting lower, and lower.  Once he thinks about how different Seth became, once he was team captain.  

The bottle itself starts to feel cold, and even though Gordon knows it’s in his head, he can’t convince himself.  It’s Flash, his teammate, his partner, his fellow butterflier, who takes the bottle from him and runs it back to Seth’s bag.  “Get on the block, Gordon,” he says.

“Should we—?”

“No,” says Flash, certain.  “No, you never tell.”

The water always feels cold at first.  That day, in that moment, the water starts to feel a little bit colder.  Gordon steps up on the block, waits for the whistle, and then he and Flash do their sprints in silence.


End file.
